Supreme Court to hear arguments on Ohio voter purge

Posted: 10:02 am Wednesday, November 22nd, 2017

By Staff Writer

By Jack Torry { Washington Bureau

The U.S. Supreme Court has re-scheduled oral arguments on Jan. 10 on whether Ohio officials violated federal law when they removed tens of thousands of people from the voting rolls simply because they had not cast ballots in recent elections.

A federal appeals court in Cincinnati in 2016 struck down Ohio’s purge of the voter rolls. The justices originally were scheduled to hear oral arguments earlier this month, but delayed them because one of the attorneys was on medical leave.

The justices will have to determine whether Ohio devised a system aimed at circumventing federal law by striking voters — many of them low-income — from the rolls simply because they hadn’t voted.

But the American Civil Liberties Union has argued that “every eligible voter has the constitutional right not to cast a vote — and the mere exercise of that right should not be the basis for removal from the voter rolls.”